In the ongoing schedule of congressional hearings involving heads of major tech and social media companies, lawmakers have been tasked with uncovering the depth of Russia’s campaign to disrupt American news and spread misinformation through popular online outlets. The Senate Intelligence Committee recently gave data from certain companies based in Silicon Valley to two outside research groups which found that Kremlin-backed instances of truth manipulation will be expected in the General Election that is 22 months away.
The top Democrat on the committee, Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA), said that lawmakers must “get serious in addressing” meddling from Russia and other foreign nations in U.S. elections. Warner said legislation “is going to require some much-needed and long-overdue guardrails when it comes to social media.”
Warner‘s comments are similar to his proposed 20-point plan to take on Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other tech giants. Taking some policy points from the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) measure, the proposals will most likely end up cementing big companies in place while freezing innovation industry wide.
Nevertheless, Axios reported that the group of researchers dubbed “New Knowledge” said “recruitment, manipulation, and influence attempts targeting the 2020 election” will occur as they did in the 2016 presidential election. They added that there will also be an “inauthentic amplification of otherwise legitimate American narratives,” which translates into the proliferation of “fake news” that has dominated headlines.
The report revealed that the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a St. Petersburg-based troll farm engaged in online influence operations on behalf of Russian businesses and political interests, focused its attention on “black audiences” on social media. Findings shows that this created “an expansive cross-platform media mirage targeting the Black community, which shared and cross-promoted authentic Black media to create an immersive influence ecosystem.”
New Knowledge’s report also stated that voter suppression tactics were implemented, “targeted almost exclusively at the Black community on Instagram and Facebook” in the progression up to the 2016 presidential election.
However, the disinformation campaign did not target Democratic-leaning social media users alone. At the same time, the IRA targeted conservative-leaning audiences with content raising fears of voter fraud occurring across the U.S.
“Surprisingly,” the Oxford-based researchers said, “these campaigns did not stop once Russia’s IRA was caught interfering in the 2016 election.”
Now rumored to possibly begin shifting their focus to younger voters, New Knowledge added they expect Russian efforts to utilize “smaller” social media platforms and messaging services as the 2020 election approaches. These are applications outside of the normal Facebook, Google, and Twitter heavyweights.
Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) said in a statement that the “data demonstrates how aggressively Russia sought to divide Americans by race, religion and ideology, and how the IRA actively worked to erode trust in our democratic institutions. Most troublingly, it shows that these activities have not stopped.”